Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom: Compiled for the Bechuanaland Protectorate Administration Classics in African Anthropology

When Professor Isaac Schapera was asked in 1934 by the Protectorate Administration to compile a record of the traditional and modern laws of the Tswana tribes he had already been working since 1929 on a comprehensive ethnographic study of the Kgatla, and his investigation was therefore based on a thorough previous knowledge of the social structure as a whole. Schapera gives a picture of what Tswana law was like in former times, and shows that, contrary to expectation, modern European contact and…